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People are throwing fits about the schools name that it needs to be changed.

Let’s look at a couple things we need to consider. This is history. Not white, not brown, not yellow, not black history, just history. You can not change history to be suitable for your feelings. The facts have to stay or we lose history.

Now with that out of the way. Let’s put something else in the way.

There are two things to think about and make you reconsider your thoughts.

1. the man did something that a person who is building a school would think is honorable and worthy of naming a school after. That could have been simkin’s last hurrah. He could have promised to show regret and sacrifice something to help the future and better the future.

Or

2. The guy that named the school was aware of the racist stuff that simkin did. (make what you want of that statement).

We look at history and we see all of these huge civilizations with hundreds of building and tombs ransacked and destroyed by civilizations who move in on top of them. They have no sense to preserve for further study, no sense to preserve for the stories we tell our grand children. If you destroy proof of oppression, you destroy proof of suffering. If you destroy the facts that there where people who were against your race, you destroy the proof that your race achieved anything.

With the way that construction goes and way time moves and people shuffle things around, we really do not know if there ever was anything we hear about in mythology, or assumed mythology. Wee have no proof of evolution that seals the deal. We have no idea if we know where Jesus’ tomb is/was or any other religion’s main guy. Not saying any are more real or less real than the others. we just have no way to tell the scientists ” HA! LOOK RETARD THERE IT IS” . Why? because one religion rules for a while and destroys everything useless to them, and then the next religion comes along.

You have to preserve history. Yours,theirs, mine,and the one we all share.

See we have no idea if Simkin was undercover or just a straight up sicko, or some submissive dude who was pushed into the places he was. Why? because that information is not available. quit saying it is racist to preserve this stuff, it’s ignorant to not preserve proof.

2 Responses to “University of Texas Simkins Issue”

Here are some facts about Simkins’s history that may aid this discussion.

In January of 1861, Simkins was a Citadel cadet. Along with three other cadets, he participated in the firing on the Star of the West, a supply ship bound for Ft. Sumter. Arguably, these were the first shots of the Civil War.

The four cadets served in the Confederate army. Two cadets died during the war, and a third returned after the war to Sumter, South Carolina, where he lived an honorable life as a lawyer and magistrate. Following the surrender at Appomattox, Simkins chose a different path.

Simkins returned to Monticello, Florida, where as a child, he had lived a few years until his parents’ deaths. In Florida, Simkins organized and lead the Ku Klux Klan. Simkins engaged in violence against freed slaves. Through threats of violence, he prevented African Americans from voting. He robbed a train of rifles intended for the Florida militia, and his fellow Klansman used those rifles to terrorize African Americans. Simkins himself carried a gun, wore a mask, put a mask on his horse, and was a Klan night rider. In just one of the counties under his command, the Klan murdered 25 people during a three year period.

After Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Acts in 1871, local authorities started to arrest Klansman associated with Simkins. Congressional investigation put additional pressure on the Florida Klan, and soon after 1871, Simkins and his brother Eldred were gone to Texas, where they began to practice law.

Four decades later, while teaching at The University of Texas, Simkins extolled the virtues of the Klan to UT’s undergraduates. He proudly spoke of his Klan past during terrible years of white supremacist violence against African Americans in Texas and elsewhere. The alumni association published his Klan speech in the commencement edition of The Alcalde in 1916. He never repented of his involvement nor expressed regret concerning his activities as a Reconstruction-era Klansman.

So does this make the school worth keeping? or does this uncover a lot of bad things about the school?

If the school was lead by bad people who kept him on, then in that sense the school is bad. Should we destroy the school and build one with a lesser evil past?

Or do we make the best we can with what’s available?

I have no opinion either way. I didn’t go to that school and I know nothing of him. I have no idea if what you said can be proven as truth or not.
I am trying to point out missing pieces of history will never be missed. but the story of the past can change numerous times because all proof is removed and destroyed, swept under a rug because someone or a large group of people decide it should go. When after a few hundred years things may be different.

Sweep enough under the rug and the story and legends will change to an unimaginable story.

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